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Stand by for a licence clarification

Story: OpenOffice developers clear Visual Studio licensing hurdleTotal Replies: 0
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AnonymousCoward

Feb 14, 2005
1:46 PM EST 		"Visual Studio library components may not be used for building GPLed projects".

The journo has chosen her title very carelessly, but I believe that she has an important point. On one hand, it is Microsoft's own environment, the tools there should be better on their side, but on the other hand the better FOSS toolsets are in this alien land, the better able we will be to present FOSS "products" as a shiny, clean, fast, robust alternative.

MinGW allows us to build efficient native Win32 code, but there is no FOSS debugger that I know of which will do the equivalent of Visual Studio on Win32. Perhaps we can formally "donate" a copy of native Win32 KDevelop to the project when it passes beta?

For those who don't understand why it's so important to present FOSS on Win32: yesterday I finished the network configuration of a Win2k workstation for a small business, which the supplier's tech was apparently incapable of doing himself, simple as it was. When I walked out, the lady using the workstation was delightedly browsing with FireFox, emailing with Thunderbird and using OpenOffice as an "MS-Word viewer" plugin.

She is one (1) vertical market app away from complete platform independence. The business' owner is down to two (2) apps away (one of the apps being SolidWorks). I have many, many clients with Linux-based servers who are in this situation, and one who is trialling their last remaining entrapment (System Builder Plus client) under WINE, with flawless results so far.

Platform independence == painless move to Linux workstations.

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